Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013
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Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 200 pages. ISBN: 9780262017497. Hardcover, $24.95.
Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 240 pages. ISBN: 9781421406169. Hardcover, $29.95.
Reviewed by
St. Francis College (N.Y.)
The word consciousness is bandied about among academics but is a rather slippery term: some use it as shorthand for spiritual mysticism, others for an organic process. Christof Koch, in Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, engages in, on the one hand, a continuing quest for a greater understanding of consciousness (and not just the human variety), and, on the other hand, an academic explanation of the physiology of consciousness. The book is subtitled Romantic since Koch believes the “universe has contrails of meaning . . . in the sky . . . and deep within us” and Reductionist since his method is “quantitative” (8). In this dual approach the book (colloquial and humorous) is scientific and elegant, intellectually absorbing and personally entertaining. Whereas other scientists (Antonio Damasio and Michael Gazzaniga, to name two neuroscientists) have managed to produce eloquent prose for a general audience, Koch has gone further to inject himself into such writing – and the reader is captivated.
The physical properties of the book are good. There are ten chapters, with subheadings throughout each chapter. There are notes, a bibliography (short with only 108 items, 10 attributable to Koch or Crick), and an index (basic). The colorful graphic on the cover of the dust jacket reminds one of imagery by Dr. Seuss. Koch is a Professor of Biology and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Seattle). His main work (aptly titled) is The Quest for Consciousness. Koch spent a great deal of his career working with Francis Crick. They authored a number of papers together, and Crick figures as an important character in this memoir-like Confessions.
Consciousness is physical – organic, electrical matter. For readers who insist on some mystical component to consciousness, do not look here. Koch says there needs to be a “respect” for “hard-won neurologic and scientific knowledge” (59) – i.e., consciousness is not some other-worldly zone. (If one has an altered state of consciousness, that is consciousness impaired and not the evolutionary capacity we are designed to have for survival.) Rightly so, Koch strips consciousness away from mystical explanations and gets down, beyond brain matter, to the 1000 trillion synapses for 86 billion neurons in the human brain. (Oddly, this reductionism does not eradicate any preternatural experience; rather, with so much wiggling motion in brain matter, it helps explain it.) Koch homes in on the electrical “feedback” that “forces neurons to synchronize their activity” (18), for what makes us human is not simply the volume of our brain (some species have larger brains – dolphins) but the complex network of and conversation among neurons. The key question (with many questions about the nervous system and consciousness remaining) is how brain matter “can possess an interior perspective . . .” (24). That is, we have subjective feelings and these have provided an evolutionary advantage (31). (We will look at this evolutionary advantage in Lisa Zunshine’s book, Getting Inside Your Head.) Koch suggests that self-consciousness is an adaptive form “of older forms of body and pain consciousness” (38), a personal diagnostic. The brain generates but does not cause consciousness – neural and neuronal correlates, the actual synaptic connections are responsible (and some brain portions create “a more privileged relationship to the content of consciousness than others”) (42). Spinal cord injured patients have consciousness; cerebellum damaged patients (who could lose balance and coordination, eye and speech functions) have consciousness. We are always conscious (but for coma and deep sleep).
Koch claims that in spite of work by, e.g., Antonio Damasio (he never mentions Michael Gazzaniga), we still do not have a full or accurate list of all brain parts involved in consciousness (43). Besides, consciousness is not just about brain parts but the connections: there are a million neurons in the primary visual cortex, but activity there is meaningless (i.e. without the feeling of consciousness) if the neurons in the higher cortex are not involved (48). Koch’s particular area of expertise is with vision, and he informs us, for example, that we don’t really see with our eyes (consider dreaming): the optic nerve perceives information that gets “edited” before entering the realm of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (51).
Koch says that no one yet knows which areas of the brain “underlie consciousness”; nevertheless, that particular investigation could prove futile, since consciousness runs “across regions” of the brain (54). In fact, there are up to 1000 different neural cell types, differentiated by location, dendrite “morphology,” synaptic “architecture,” genes, electrical charges, and the destination of axons (which pretty much solves – eradicates – the mind/brain split) (54).
In the course of brain monitoring epileptics (and the medial temporal lobe) it was revealed that there is “startling selectivity at the level of individual nerve cells . . . [i.e., that] medial temporal lobe neurons [which include the hippocampus, responsible for memory] are indeed extremely picky about what excites them” (65). This selectivity points to individual differences (in spite of brain similarity across species) and bolsters the general statement Koch makes early in the book: “It is, after all, in the choice of what we work on that we reveal much about our inner drives and motives” (8). This means that repeated exposure to an object or person generates neuronal activity, and patterns are therefore instantiated in the medial temporal lobe because of where one regularly decides to go, what one routinely decides to see, and with whom one usually decides to consort. Nevertheless, there are unconscious processes at work – there must be (as clearly there was, evolutionarily) a “cleansing mechanism” to shield us from thoughts of our own mortality, anxiousness, and depression (76). So there are exposed, deliberate, and hidden, automatic, patterns. This means that some (but certainly not all) of the “actions of the sovereign ‘I’ are determined by habits, instincts, and impulses that largely bypass conscious inspection” (77). Koch is not, however, suggesting that an individual is not responsible – in fact, the opposite seems to be the case (and a point driven home by Gazzaniga in his book The Ethical Brain).
In chapter seven, perhaps the most intriguing, Koch looks at free will, and declares that “freedom is just another word for feeling” (91). (This phraseology reminds one of Douglas Allchin’s observation that morality is a behavior.) But as in many other parts of the book, the emphasis is on mechanics. Looking at free will through physics (and of course invoking Benjamin Libet, whose experiments still hold), Koch says that while the universe is governed by cause-and-effect, we nonetheless require the feeling of agency. Koch’s causality implies that one cannot “do and say things that are not a direct consequence” of one’s “predispositions and . . . circumstances” (91).This is not precisely Ortega y Gasset’s I am myself and my circumstances, where emphasis might be placed more on the circumstances, but rather (to borrow from my Ethos and Behavior) I am myself in spite of my circumstances – one’s genetic makeup compounded by the “habits and consistent choices . . .” repeatedly made through one’s life (95) and converted into neural patterns in the medial temporal lobe. (Of course Jerome Kagan’s research indicates that we are born with a temperament that persists.) But Koch is no Newtonian determinist. Invoking quantum mechanics (Werner Heisenberg, 1927), Koch suggests, on the cellular and neuronal levels, that there can be an uncertain, ambiguous, and random aspect (99). It’s not what will happen but what might probably happen.
In terms of consciousness, the human brain develops “concept neurons” (patterns of changes that develop with similarly repeated stimuli), but action potentials on the neuronal level vary from one encounter with the stimulus (a face, an idea) to the next – “quantum indeterminacy” can lead to “behavioral indeterminacy” (101). Turns out that the behavioral unpredictability favored organisms over time, granting them the ability to modify actions or choices (101). This is where Libet comes in. Although we act before we are aware of acting (and the feeling of willing an act does not cause the action), the personal sensation (consciousness) does belong to the individual. Libet’s groundbreaking experiment (of hand movement performed before conscious awareness of such), however, does not account for more complex problems and dilemmas we face. (See, e.g., work by Joshua Greene on moral dilemmas and Zunshine’s investigation of theory of mind.) We need the feeling of agency, control, which springs from neural activity. Examples of loss of control include addictions, Tourette Syndrome, obsessive compulsions.
Koch discusses and explains much current research (as he has worked with such researchers). He firmly believes other animal species have consciousness, that they “experience life” in a way not dissimilar from us (151). While his last chapter is very personal and engaging (lots of confessing), he manages to raise some spectacular (though unanswerable) questions concerning the existence of God.
As clear as Koch is in his writing, he is nevertheless dealing in (as he admits) an area still filled with unknowns. Such is not the case with Lisa Zunshine’s Getting Inside Your Head: rather than skirting around the murky areas of consciousness, she applies the well-accepted concept of theory of mind to popular culture. However, Koch’s book (or any other) on consciousness (especially with its physiological and evolutionary aspects) is fundamental to understanding the roots of theory of mind. (An enlightened look at neuroscience is Jean-Pierre Changeux’s The Physiology of Truth.) In a nutshell, Zunshine’s thesis is that we often manifest an “embodied transparency” in experiencing (or estimating someone else’s) thoughts and feelings, and our greed (her word) to read other people is what has fueled our culture.
In fact, the first sentence of Zunshine’s book says it all: “We live in other people’s heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unawares, mistakenly, inescapably” (xi). Of course mistaken since as often as we attempt to read another’s mind we are not always correct. Yet since theory of mind is anxiously working, it has enabled our cultural icons – from novels, theater, movies, television, and visual arts. Since our long evolutionary heritage (during the Pleistocene) was social, and since a great deal of our consciousness is about other people, our cultural representations mimic what we do in real life: we read characters in novels and guess their intentions, we study the body language of actors on stage for emotional clues (and respond to cues from the audience), and we examine closely the facial nuances of screen actors to gauge their thoughts.
Lisa Zunshine, the Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky (Lexington), has authored or edited ten books (and numerous articles). Her books include: Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative; Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies; Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. In her Preface, Zunshine says this book took about five years to write, part of which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), and includes research from time spent at Yale University and Paul Bloom’s Mind and Development Lab. The physical properties of the book are very good (though the dust jacket borders on the garish – perhaps deliberately), and there are 36 illustrations. There are ten chapters, with useful subordinate sections clearly marked in each chapter. The book concludes with a Coda (summary of key ideas) and includes Notes, an extensive Bibliography, and a comprehensive Index.
Zunshine tells us that theory of mind empowers culture and is premised as follows: we have an inborn need to read other minds, and that’s what cultural representations help satisfy; we expect others to attempt to read our own mind, and so our evolution has endowed our bodies with ways to express mental attributes. Because of these two premises “we assume that there must be a mental state behind an observable behavior,” although we don’t know exactly what the mental state is, and yet we accept as true whatever we can glean or conjecture (17-18). In this way, Zunshine has come up with a key idea (and a nicely coined phrase) to express her thesis: “embodied transparency” – defined as a moment when “body language involuntarily betrays . . . feelings . . .” (23). This ability to read mental states works well with fictional characters rather than real people and explains why we have such cultural representations (since consciousness in real time is not as effective in connecting all the dots concerning one’s behavior). There are three requirements (especially in fiction) for “embodied transparency”: contrast (among characters in a key scene); transience (so that the behavior does not persist continuously); and restraint (so that the reader has to guess at the character’s inner feelings and thoughts) (30).
Zunshine applies these ideas lucidly with good examples throughout the book: she is an astute literary critic and psychologist. As noted, other genres are examined equally well. For instance, there is the theater, where one goes (especially in the eighteenth century) to read other people as much as (or more so than) the performance (and true, too, of horse racing). Movies are particularly well suited for embodied transparency, especially those complex characters in key scenes where they try to hide a feeling or thought (and so we attempt to read into them). Of course with a movie the director can offer close ups of facial expressions not available to theater goers. There is television, where we often need to distinguish fact from fiction: we process fiction differently than fact, and so there is a moral element if we accept something as true and learn later (to our chagrin) that we have been duped. There is cinéma vérité which at first tried to capture expressed feelings in real time (though the presence of a camera holds in question any authenticity), but then, eventually, this genre began to mock itself in television shows such as The Office and in Reality T.V. There are musicals where we accept the act of singing and the song as “revealing . . . true feelings” (142). And finally there is painting, especially complex in terms of theory of mind. For instance, we could be reading the mind of someone in the painting: one absorbed in an act; one contemplating a question (such as a marriage proposal); one engaged in a dilemma of some sort not disclosed. If the representations in the painting are too challenging (e.g., surreal art) we consider the mind of the artist. With abstract art we focus on reading our own minds.
Zunshine’s book was difficult to stop reading; while she handles all these genres with skill, clearly her strength is in reading literature (as she returns to literary references even in the other chapters). Having an understanding of human evolution and how the brain works makes reading a book such as Zunshine’s more satisfying. Whereas Koch focuses on how consciousness works, Zunshine puts such a function into perspective by explaining why we have a mind anxious to read other minds. In a sense, one could say that theory of mind is our consciousness exposed.